Read Online December 6 by Martin Cruz Smith - Free Book Online

had gone in reverse.
    He found Taro aboard his boat. It wasn’t hard. Taro had been big even as a boy, as one of the faithful ronin who had hunted Harry down, and he was huge as a man, a sumo with a high forehead, topknot and tent-size kimono. An open firebox lit the fishing boat’s simple lines: the low gunwales, single oarlock, seining pole at the stern.
    “Tanks are drained,” Taro said.
    “What do you care?” Harry asked.
    “You can run a taxi on charcoal, you can’t run a boat.” The boat had no wheelhouse, only a canvas shelter that Taro stooped under to trim lines and nets. “If my father could see this. Remember the time you came out with us and a shark got on board?”
    “We jumped then.”
    “We jumped high. Now they want us to go out and catch shark for shoe leather. Shoe leather! I won’t do it, Harry, not on my father’s boat.”
    Harry hadn’t heard Taro be so filial before. He also hadn’t heard what was so urgent that Taro had to see him this early in the day. It was the same way sumos wrestled. Before the actual grappling, there might be ten minutes of glaring and stomping around the ring. Taro sat by the firebox, lit a cigarette and took a flask of sake from a tin pan on top of the box. He poured the sake into two cups that looked like doll china in his hands.
    Harry squatted and tried to keep his pant cuffs clean. “It’s a little early.”
    “Not for me,” Taro mumbled. “A good fisherman would be bringing in his catch by now. Fish, not shoe leather. Kampai! ”
    “ Kampai! ” Harry threw the cup back. The last thing he wanted was to match drinks with a sumo. Sumos trained on sake . It was a breach of their etiquette to turn down a drink. Also, there was something particularly abject about Taro this morning, like an ox on its knees.
    “The fishing is pretty bad?” Harry asked.
    Taro poured another. “The fish are there. Fish are everywhere, but it’s too far without gas. Even the bays are open.”
    “All the bays?”
    “That’s what they say.”
    “Every bay?”
    “Yes.”
    “HitokappuBay?”
    “Wide open.”
    “ Banzai! ” Harry said. Hitokappu was where the Combined Fleet had gathered in November and then barely stirred for lack of fuel. If the warships left there but hadn’t appeared at any other bay in Japan, Harry wondered where an entire fleet had gone.
    Taro tipped forward and became solemn. “Harry, remember Jiro?”
    “Your brother? How could I forget?” Taro and Jiro were huge twins told apart by their names, meaning “firstborn” and “second.”
    “He made your life miserable.”
    “Not all the time,” Harry said. “We had some fun.”
    “Picking pockets?”
    “Yeah. Jiro was large like you. He did the bumping and I did the dipping.”
    “He always had money when he was with you.” Taro fell silent, then said, “Jiro only helped pick pockets because the boat came to me. I was the older twin. If he’d been first, he would have been Taro and I would have been Jiro. That makes you think.” He squinted into the firebox. “You know what they say about twins. The parents must have been… you know… too much.”
    True, Harry thought. Let a couple have twins and the neighborhood acted as if the parents were randy as dogs.
    “Everyone sniggered except you, Harry. Everyone. That’s why he went bad, I’m convinced.”
    “He was a little rough around the edges.”
    “The police gave him a choice, the army or jail.”
    “He always wanted to fight. He got his chance.”
    “Harry, can I ask you for a favor?”
    “It depends.”
    “That’s always your answer, isn’t it?”
    “It depends.”
    Taro felt in his sleeve and came up with a telegram. He smoothed it out against his chest and gave it to Harry, who read it by the light of the fire. The telegram offered congratulations from the army and informed the recipient when the remains of Lance Corporal Kaga Jiro would arrive at Tokyo Station.
    “Christ. It’s this afternoon.”
    “It’s the